2022 Breakout Writers Prize Winners
We are proud to announce the winners of the 2022 Breakout Writers Prize, co-presented with The Author’s Guild: Olivia Fantini (fiction), Sabine Holzman (poetry), Aekta Khubchandani (poetry), and Mengyin Lin (fiction).
Thank you to this year’s guest judges: Nadia Owusu (fiction) and Shane McCrae (poetry)
The 2022 Winners:
Olivia Fantini grew up in Massachusetts and spent six years working in public schools as an English Language Development teacher. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Minnesota where she was awarded the Gesell Fellowship. Her short story “Experimental Trials” received third place in the 2021 Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction from Philadelphia Stories, and her fiction has also appeared in TriQuarterly. She is currently at work on a novel and a memoir.
Nadia Owusu on Olivia’s work: “The characters in “At the Airport” are suspended from a thin thread, swinging back and forth in the space between before and after, beginning and ending. This is a beautiful and precise story about loss, vulnerability, and carrying on.”
Sabine Holzman studies German at UMass Amherst.
Shane McCrae on Sabine’s work: Each of these poems has its own particular strengths, but chief among the strengths common to them all is the sureness of the poet’s observations, and the confidence of the poet’s voice. My favorite poem here is “Against Anabasis,” which reads like an ending that is also a beginning—it is itself the kind of testimony that can result from serious thinking, and sets up the reader to do their own serious thinking after setting the poem down, which seems to me almost all one can ask of poetry.
Aekta Khubchandani is a writer from Bombay. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, where she conducts month-long poetry workshops. She is matriculating her dual MFA in Poetry & Nonfiction from The New School, where she is the Readings and Community Development Assistant. Her poems are long listed for Toto Awards by TFA for the third time. Her fiction, “Love in Bengali Dialect,” that won the Pigeon Pages Fiction contest, has been nominated for Best American Short Fiction. Besides her work is nominated for Best of Net (Poetry) 2021 by Nurture Literary, Best Microfiction by Passages North, and Favorite Online Articles and Essays by Entropy. Her film, “New Normal” whose script she has written, won the Best Microfilm award at Indie Short Fest by Los Angeles International Film Festival. She has works published in Speculative Nonfiction, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s working on two hybrid books that smudge prose and poetry.
Shane McCrae on Aekta’s work: “The energy in these poems is so headlong that the poems, at certain moments, read as if they’re about to explode. And yet the poems are well controlled, and the structure of each reveals itself as one reads, and even where one expects to find only energy, one finds both energy and an organizing intelligence. ‘The Middle of Beauty’ seems to me the best example of the kind of controlled explosion that characterizes these poems.”
Mengyin Lin is a writer of fiction and screenplays and a translator. She holds a BFA in Film from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is currently a MFA candidate in Fiction at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Beijing, China, Mengyin’s first language is Mandarin Chinese, which she favors in speech; English is her second language, in which she writes. She is also a certified yoga teacher and an amateur pianist (as long as no one is listening). She goes by “M" among her friends and lives in New York with her partner and two furry children.
Nadia Owusu on Mengyin’s work: “In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” two Chinese students in the United States fall in love, but upon returning home, and as they live through a pandemic, they awaken to how little they have in common. This story vividly brings to life some of the most pressing questions of our challenging times.”
The 2022 Guest Judges:
Nadia Owusu is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks, topped many most-anticipated and best book of the year lists, including The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, TIME, Vulture, and the BBC. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Orion, Epiphany, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. By day, Nadia is Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm working for justice and liberation in partnership with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. She teaches creative writing at the Mountainview MFA program and lives in Brooklyn.
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Rilke Prize, and The Gilded Auction Block, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
